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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25453426">The love of a mother</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ouiche/pseuds/Ouiche'>Ouiche</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Lily Evans Potter Lives, Magical Physics, Magical Theory (Harry Potter), Murder Mystery, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 09:20:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>17,176</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25453426</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ouiche/pseuds/Ouiche</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>When Severus Snapes had asked Lord Voldemort to spare Lily, what was he expecting would happen to her ? </p>
<p>A.U. where Voldemort did spare Lily, and her sacrifice failed. Now between death and life, Voldemort needs to investigate her mind like a crime scene, to understand how she protected her child and nearly defeated him.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Lily Evans Potter &amp; Severus Snape, Lily Evans Potter &amp; Voldemort</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The love of a mother</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is my first fanfic in a decade, and the very first in English (I thus implore you to be tolerant with my style, and hope everything is at least understandable). The narration is quite experimental. Please feel free to comment. </p>
<p>Heed the tags, this is not a happy story.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>You can never be sure to force the truth out of someone during interrogation. Torture, Legillimency, Veritaserum, none of them guarantee a complete, understandable and truthful answer. While it is a problem for us Aurors, it will be an advantage for you against the Death Eaters and their boss. The first, and most likely method they use is torture. The Death Eaters all know how to throw a Cruciatus, that’s a prerequisite for the job. Magical torture is one of their main tool of terror, what they usually don’t know is that torture is shit for gaining intel. Even though Crouch authorized the Aurors to use the Unforgivables against suspects, I never condoned it. Not because it’s unethical, because it doesn’t work. People in pain lie, they forget, they mix up memories. Sometimes they’ll tell the truth, in the middle of so many useless, meaningless drabbles you won’t even notice. Sometimes, they really don’t know anything, but will tell you what they think you’ll want to hear just so you stop. They say everyone talks, in the end. Maybe that’s true, I’m not even sure of that, because sometimes people can be stubborn as hell. But even if they do talk, that doesn’t mean it’ll be useful, or how long is “in the end”. So, if they torture you for information, you can play on that. Lie. Tell them so much nonsense they’ll won’t be able to tell whether it’s lies. Don’t tell them anything at all. Anything that can buy you some time. Time for us to get you, time for the intel to become irrelevant because we know they got you and changed our plans. The only thing you’ll have to remember is: they can’t tell when you lie. Even the Dark Lord won’t be able to tell, because pain messes up with the way a legilimens feels the lies. If a legilimens tries to read you when you’re in pain, they’ll just be in as much pain themselves. So if you can hurt yourself, you can also buy yourself time. </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Which takes me to the second possibility, legilimency. Now, the Mind Arts aren’t that common. We know the Blacks usually learn the basics, but not many of the others. You-Know-Who is supposedly very good at it, but he still has the same limitations as everyone else: that he sees into your mind doesn’t mean he understands what he finds there. You can make it difficult for him to understand what he reads, confuse the context, or confuse yourself so you don’t remember for sure. Memories are plastic and unreliable things, that’s why Pensieve memories and Legilimency can’t be received in Court. And lastly, you can bluff: when a talented Occlumens protects their mind, no one can tell they are even Occluding. Which means you can make them doubt, make them believe you are Occluding successfully, even when you don’t know how to.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>The last one and rarest is Veritaserum. Veritaserum is a powerful interrogation tool, but not in the way people usually want to use it. Veritaserum is good when the target doesn’t know they’ve been dosed, because you’ve slipped it in their drinks. That’s why it is designed to be colourless, tasteless and odourless. But if you know you’ve been given some, there are workarounds. Veritaserum forces you to tell the truth, only the truth. In some measure it’ll try to make you tell all the truth. What you have to remember is that the judge of the truth, for Veritaserum, is your own brain. So you can tell things that are true “from a certain point of view”. I once saw a suspect tell under Veritaserum that they hadn’t killed the victim, because they had only made a large rock fall on them, but the rock was the cause of death, not themselves. The power of the Veritaserum lies mainly in the skill of the interrogator to ask the right questions, with an unambiguous formulation. But even if the question is perfect, the Veritaserum only forces you to tell the truth, not to make it understandable. If I asked Albus right now under Veritaserum for the exact address of the Order Headquarters, he could answer me in Mermish, and it would be useless to me. You can speak in another language, or code the answer. You can use the compulsion to tell all the truth to give the information in so much excruciating detail that it’ll take them ages to sort it out. You can take some information that is barely relevant to the answer, and convince yourself it is essential and start explaining from there. Beware, that’s a double-edged sword: you risk spilling other secrets to protect your main intel. But sometimes, it’s worth it.</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Alastor Moody, Introductory talk on interrogation for Aurors</p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Someone is behind Lily, just behind, and they mutter to her ear. What is your secret ?</p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Lily is running up the stairs at Godric’s Hollow, and she’s feeling the strongest déjà vu, as if she has already fled Lord Voldemort tens, hundreds of times. She’s terrified, but it feels so far, far away as she opens, one spell at a time, the wards on Harry’s door, and painfully put them up again after closing it. She’s high on adrenaline, she’s panting so hard she can hardly hum the diagnostic charm to check that all the protections are in place. Out there, the fight has stopped. Somewhere far, a part of her notes that James is probably dead by now. The last word he had said were “<em>Take Harry and go</em>”. But she hadn’t. There were anti-apparition wards, over all Godric’s Hollow, and she couldn’t outrun him that far with Harry in her arms. The plan, the one they had rehearsed weekly, had her use the Cloak. Don’t think about the Cloak. The one she didn’t have, because they had lent it to Dumbledore to study. Don’t think about what he is studying. Voldemort is breaking the wards alarmingly fast. He sounds like he’s having fun. She flicks her wand, deactivating the last fail-safe. She places a careful last kiss on her son’s forehead, and put him into the crib. The trap is set.</p>
<p>Everything stops, and she is drowning in a sea of red. It was a memory, relived again and again as Voldemort is invading her mind, trying to understand what has happened that night.</p>
<p>“<em>What was that ?” </em>The Dark Lord asks, his voice resonating inside her skull. “<em>What spell were you cancelling ? You were not just fleeing mindlessly, you were coming with a plan. You had a trap, what kind of trap ? “</em></p>
<p>“<em>A deadly one”</em>, she thinks.</p>
<p>“It didn’t work. You can tell me now.”</p>
<p>“<em>It worked well enough”</em>. And she smirks.</p>
<p>“I am not dead.”</p>
<p>“You’re not alive either. That’s enough for me.”</p>
<p>“But not enough for your son.”</p>
<p>Unbidden memories of Harry flood her mind. Harry’s bright green eyes, looking right at her. His messy hair, brushing against her cheek as he falls asleep in her arms. Hearing the beating of his heart for the first time, with the muggle midwife she had dragged James to, because she wanted an ultrasound to know if it was really a boy. She had wanted him to be a girl, wanted him to be free from the prophecy.</p>
<p>Unfettered, her mind switches to the memory of Dumbledore’s office, stupid Sybil Trelawney’s sepulchral voice emerging from the Pensieve.</p>
<p>“The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches…”</p>
<p>No, she thinks firmly. That's a secret, I have to protect it from the Dark Lord. Moody said that, with Legilimency, your own mind was your enemy. It is endlessly associating one thought with another, and the Legilimens exploits that to navigate. The first step of Occlumency is to stop associating.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Lily’s cell is nothing like she imagined the Dark Lord's dungeons would be. It is not a stone bare cell underground, damp,dark and cold, with chains and iron bars. It is a spartiate room, with an old fashioned bed, a lone chair and a table. There is even a small bathroom. It is, by any prison standards, rather comfortable. What drives Lily crazy, though, is the isolation. The room has no door, except when someone comes from the outside. As soon as they are gone, the door disappears, and it seems as if the room is untethered from the outside world, floating in its one constricted independent universe. Lily knows how to recognize a pocket dimension, and she knows the room she is in is only a modified version of a mokeskin pouch. If the key were destroyed, she would be trapped in there forever, her little piece of space and time inaccessible from the outside. After a long time in the room, she finds herself having panic attacks, fearing she is there for all eternity.</p>
<p>She has no sense of time in it. She has no idea whether the time is the same inside and outside the room. Inside, the lights are always on. There is no night that could mark the passing of days, and Lily has no idea how long she has been there. Meals seem to appear irregularly, but she doesn’t know if they are periodic, and she just loses the notion of time in between, or if they are purposefully erratic so that she can’t know how long it has been.</p>
<p>Her only visitor has been Voldemort. He comes to her cell, conjures armchairs for them and delves into her mind in the search for answers. He feeds her with Veritaserum and asks her questions. It was surprising at first. She had expected a lot of passion from him, rage, hate, scorn, disgust, all kinds of torture and his enjoyement of her suffering. Instead, he is more professional that most Aurors. He is intense, collected, inquisitive, sharp. He is investigating her mind like a crime scene, and in a way it is, since she has killed his body. His soul remains tethered inside, controlling the limbs and organs by the sheer power of his magic, but his body is dead, decaying. A terrifying walking corpse. She can see the efforts he makes to preserve it.</p>
<p>She longs for his presence, and she hates herself for it. There is no noise in her little personal universe. No noise and eternal light, and unrelenting devouring guilt. For she is alive, and her baby is dead.</p>
<p>-----</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Once the Dark Lord has found a thread to follow in her mind, he starts to explore more of her life than just that fated Halloween night. In a way, it is a relief for Lily to relive happier memories. Any snippet of life that could relate to the trap she had built, she would show to him, in the hope that the more pieces she adds to the puzzle, the more difficult to see the big picture. They are now reviewing her wedding ceremony, and she can feel his rage swelling at the loss of time. Lily is basking in the warm sun of June 1979, laughing at the unease of Petunia and her insufferable Vernon, smiling at the animated debate on the nature of transfiguration taking place between her father, Dumbledore and McGonagall. Sirius has made his mission to prank all the guests at least once. He has succeeded in charming the champagne so that it plays out loud the song one currently has in their head. It had been pretty fun when Dumbledore had played and danced the Bee Gees with enthusiasm in front of a befuddled wizarding assembly that was still blissfully unaware of the ravages of disco.</p>
<p>Voldemort has had enough. He rips himself out of the memory, ravaging it beyond repair. Lily is once again in the armchair in her cell, Voldemort facing her in a similar seat.</p>
<p>“Is your wedding a relevant element of the trap you prepared for me ?” He asks, rage barely contained.</p>
<p>The Veritaserum kicks in and Lily nods.</p>
<p>“How is it relevant ?”</p>
<p>“It made me part of the Potter family line.”</p>
<p>The Dark Lord ponders the answer for a moment before continuing his interrogation.</p>
<p>“Is the ritual you’ve performed linked to family magic ?”</p>
<p>Lily does not want to answer. She grinds her teeth, trying to find a way to satisfy the urge of the Veritaserum without giving out too much. She loses. Yes and no questions are the best approach to use Veritaserum on a prisoner.</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“Which branch of the family was it ?”</p>
<p>Again, Lily tries to find a way to divert. James was a pureblood, he was related to virtually any other pureblood family. But only one is relevant for the ritual, and she finds no way to trick her brain otherwise.</p>
<p>“The Peverells.”</p>
<p>“Interesting. I am descended from the Peverells myself, one of the rare pureblood families my line had dealing with. Did you know ?”</p>
<p>“No.”</p>
<p>No one knows where the Dark Lord comes from. He claims he is the Heir of Slytherin, through his well-known use of Parseltongue. Lily has investigated the branches of the Peverell genealogy, when she was researching the Cloak. Only one branch has allied with the line of Slytherin, marrying a daughter and losing the name Peverell. All the branches of that line have officially died out, the Stewards and the Gaunts being the last ones containing known Parselmouths. Is Voldemort a descendant from the Steward line, and hiding his identity because of its known Muggle ancestry ? His accent is definitively British, with some faint traces of Cockney, especially when he is talking directly to her mind. But he could very well be a descendant from the american line, raised in Britain.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When Lily comes back to her mind, Voldemort is gone.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“Here, you see ?” Lily says to Dumbledore, putting the Cloak on a sleeping baby Harry. “This part of the ward is keyed to the owner of the Cloak, and is active whether it is worn or not.”</p>
<p>Detection devices crowd her desk, revealing in colourful lights the enchantments woven into the ancient artifact. The spellwork is archaic and elegant, weaving seamlessly necromancy, runic warding, coincidental magic, and parts she doesn’t even begin to understand, that Dumbledore tells her are soul magic and Dark Arts. The heirloom is an incredible piece of magic, a masterpiece as much as Hogwarts, the work of a life.</p>
<p>“It almost looks as if the invisibility is a side effect of the ward, and not a feature.”</p>
<p>“I think you’re right, dear Lily. The runic field generated by the deflector here shadows the Cloak itself and its wearer, but it is only a radiation from the protection ward.”</p>
<p>“Even though most of the ward is inactive. At first, I thought it was because Harry’s just a baby, and can’t fuel the spell, but I computed the predicted input, and the amount of power is preposterous.”</p>
<p>She gives him her notes, but he chuckles before giving them back.</p>
<p>“You will excuse an old man his need to do the calculations the slow, traditional way. My proficiency in differential equations is not there yet. But I trust your estimation, and the energy needed to fuel the full wards is indeed tremendous, though not as impossible as you might think.”</p>
<p>Eyes twinkling, Dumbledore raises his wand and pours his magic into the device. One by one the small silver contraptions on the right side of the desk lighten up. Lily could never activate more than a tenth of that. The wards are powered for a moment, but not entirely yet.</p>
<p>“There is a missing part on this side, I’d wager,” the old wizards says. “See here, some of the variables are sent out, and the rest of the ward is waiting for an external output. I have several hypotheses on what we’re missing, but I’d need some time to research. Would it be problematic for James and you to lend me the Cloak temporarily ?”</p>
<p>Lily hesitates. The Cloak is a powerful protection for Harry. But they live under the Fidelius anyway. Lily knows the spell forward and backwards, she has spent the last three years reconstructing the old magic from the notes of Rowena Ravenclaw, supervised by Dumbledore. She still has to finish writing her thesis and hand it to Flitwick, but Harry’s birth has come in the way. Harry never gets out of the range of the Fidelius, he doesn’t really need the Cloak. If they can unravel its magic, it could save so many lives. It could change the tides of the war.</p>
<p>-----</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When she’s alone in her silent universe, Lily sings. She sings every tune she can remember. She sings the Jungle Book that she used to dance with Petunia. She sings jazz classics her father played at home. She sings the disco tubes she danced on with James when they started dating and she was taking the Marauders to “exotic” muggle dancefloors. She sings the lullabies she had sung to lull Harry to sleep, and she sobs madly between the verses.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When Voldemort comes back to her room, hours or days later she has no idea, he is humming the Bee Gees, and Lily finds it hilarious. Lord Voldemort, walking dead, singing Staying Alive, because of Dumbledore and herself. Lily laughs so hard she can’t breath. Of course, he is incredibly vexed, but also rather surprised. The last time someone laughed at him is probably very long ago.</p>
<p>He decides that, if she wants to laugh, he will oblige. The Dark Lord is well known for his use of the Cruciatus, but only Lily finds herself at the end of his Tickling Charm.</p>
<p>Again and again, he forces the laugh from her, long after she has stopped wanting to. He keeps the charm going on and on, and she can’t breathe. Then it stops, and goes again.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>But when he goes out of the room, she is clinging at this little idea. Because he spends so much time if her mind, she has the power to choose the tune that will play again and again in his head. She can reclaim a little power with music and irony.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Oh, the next time she sings “I will survive”.</p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>“Severus ? Where are we ?”</p>
<p>Two children sit by the river, their feet in the cool water.</p>
<p>“By the Ribble, Lily.”</p>
<p>“No, I mean, are we in a dream ?”</p>
<p>Severus seems to hesitate.</p>
<p>“Something like that.”</p>
<p>Lily sits pensievely for a while.</p>
<p>“Severus, are we dead ?”</p>
<p>“Not yet.”</p>
<p>“I feel like I’m missing someone. Someone very important, but I can’t remember who. Do you know who it could be ?”</p>
<p>“I do.”</p>
<p>“Well, who is it, Severus ?”</p>
<p>“I can’t tell you, Lily. I’m sorry.”</p>
<p>“Why ?”</p>
<p>“Because it would harm you.”</p>
<p>Severus sighs, a sigh that makes him look a hundred years old.</p>
<p>“We are in my head, Lily. You see, when your body is broken beyond what your mind can stand, the mind retreats in itself. It detaches from what happens, to protect itself and deal with the harm later. But when the mind itself is assaulted, it has nothing to retreat to. It breaks. So instead, I gave you shelter here, in my mind. All your memories, all your feelings have been left behind, so that your mind can heal. I can’t tell you, because it would damage your mind beyond repair.”</p>
<p>“Oh.”</p>
<p>Lily feels she should be worried. What happened to her outside the dream seems very awful, she should be distressed. She should be angry at Severus for not telling. But he is right, she has left her ability to feel behind. She can’t care.</p>
<p>She moves closer to him, and hugs him tightly.</p>
<p>“Thank you, Severus. Thank you for taking care of me.”</p>
<p>There are tears on his cheeks, but she ignores them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>When Lily wakes, she is in her room and she can’t remember ever living elsewhere. She knows she has had other homes before, but she has no memories of it.</p>
<p>Severus is sitting in an armchair beside her bed, examining her with his deep black eyes.</p>
<p>Her heart starts to race at his sight. She feels frozen like a rabbit in the lights of a truck. It has been so long since she has seen anyone in the room but Voldemort. She remembers his presence in her mind, overwhelming and invasive, day after day. Guilt, despair, hate flood her mind and shatter the fragile peace Severus has brought back to her mind. She embraces the feelings. She does not want peace. She does not deserve it.</p>
<p>“ What are you looking at, Death Eater ?” she snarls at him. “You’re appraising how well you’ve repaired my mind so that your master can break it again ? Does it amuse you ?”</p>
<p>He recoils, and look away.</p>
<p>“ Lily, I only want to help you. I can’t stand seeing you like that. We may have fallen apart, but I still care for you.”</p>
<p>The laugh she barks is everything but sane.</p>
<p>“ Care ? Please, we both know you’re only here because he wants you to. He needs you to keep me sane enough to interrogate me again.”</p>
<p>“Your mind is breaking, Lily, you have to let me help you.”</p>
<p>“Have to ? I want my mind to break Severus. What do I have left ? My husband is dead, and I can barely remember him after the damage he left in my memories. My son is dead, and I could do nothing to prevent it. I am the prisoner of a mad walking corpse, who is invading my mind everyday to try and come back to life, and I’d rather become a drooling idiot than telling him how to. If you loved me, Severus, you would kill me, you would destroy my mind so he can never hurt me again. But we both know you’re too much of a coward for that, little snake.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Severus flees, and Lily hopes she will never see him again.</p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>“For the last time, Mrs Potter, I want an answer that I can actually understand, not your nonsensical gibberish ! What is a differential equation, and how does it relate to arithmancy ?”</p>
<p>Lily has been fighting for hours now, and she feels it will never end. She’s overdosed on Veritaserum, and the combination with the pain for the Cruciatus Curse is volatile at best. When Voldemort had had enough of being puzzled by mathematical formulations of arithmancy, he had switched tactics.</p>
<p>She has capitulated long ago. She has told everything, she has explained the best she could. But it changes nothing: the last contact Voldemort had with Muggle Math was probably the fifth grade curriculum. Even with the best intentions, it would take him years to get to differential analysis. The Veritaserum forces her to tell the truth and only the truth; when talking about maths it makes you excruciatingly exact. She can use no analogies, approximations or simplifications. She has to give all the assumptions, using the precise vocabulary, when the Dark Lord has no idea that function, matrix or variable have a completely different meaning in her mouth.</p>
<p>“I can’t ! Please, please, I need time to explain. I don’t…You just don’t know enough.”</p>
<p>“I sincerely doubt, presumptuous little Mudblood, that there is a single magical topic you’d know better than I do”, he snarls.</p>
<p>“Not…Magic. Differential equations are not Magic. Muggles scientists invented them.”</p>
<p>Voldemort look upon her lying form on the floor, disgusted.</p>
<p>“You used Muggle Science on Magic. I begin to think Severus failed me here,” he says, looking at the pale Death Eater sitting in a corner of the room. “You’re losing your marbles. How Muggle nonsense could be any use in Magic is beyond me.”</p>
<p>And here is the part of Magic I know better than you, she wants to reply, but even her suicidal Gryffindor courage has its limits. She can’t take more pain right now. Even if she knows she deserves it. Even when she wants to die, to lose her mind and finally be free of guilt and regrets.</p>
<p>Voldemort looks back at the collection of equations he pillaged from her mind, and frowns.</p>
<p>“It looks a little bit like calculus, but why are there letters everywhere ?”</p>
<p>“Yes. Not letters. Variables. You put a letter, and it can be any number.”</p>
<p>“Like a code ? Then what number is t supposed to be here ?”</p>
<p>Lily shakes her head weakly.</p>
<p>“I don’t know. Any one. None, really.”</p>
<p>“What do you mean, any or none ? Which ?”</p>
<p>“T is time.”</p>
<p>This is bad. Voldemort is already lost. Maybe she could be better at explaining Maths in another context. Heavens know it had already been difficult with Dumbledore, but her Dad had done most of the initial teaching. And Dumbledore was patient and curious to learn. Not that Voldemort is not curious, only his curiosity is more…demanding, and his patience quite lacking.</p>
<p>“I thought letters were there for numbers.”</p>
<p>“Yes. No. t is time, all the numbers of time, any number but not specifically one.”</p>
<p>Lily heaves, struggling with the Veritaserum. The drug doesn’t really know what to do, when Lily is unable to evaluate the truthfulness of a statement. Voldemort’s declarations are neither right or wrong, they make no sense. The cognitive dissonance makes her sick.</p>
<p>“My Lord”, Severus cuts in, before the Dark Lord can press her for answers. “With all due respect, I think it’d be better if you stopped for now and resumed later. She…I fear her mind is being irreversibly damaged.”</p>
<p>The Dark Lord seems incredibly displeased.</p>
<p>“She has not answered the questions to my satisfaction yet.”</p>
<p>“My Lord, her answers will probably be less and less coherent from now on. I doubt you could put any value in what she could tell you in her present state. You asked me to stay and supervise the conjunction of Veritaserum and pain. Here is my professional advice: if you don’t stop now, you’ll never get her back.”</p>
<p>Darkness pools round Voldemort in a thick nauseating aura, and Severus braces himself for his punishment. But the Dark Lord turns around, and leaves the room.</p>
<p>Severus gets back to the lying form of Lily, and tenderly lifts her to her bed. Lily opens her eyes and meets his.</p>
<p>“Mr Snape ? Do you know where Severus is ? May I see him ?” She asks.</p>
<p>“He will come soon, Lily. Please rest for now.”</p>
<p>“I am so tired…of living…”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Lily drinks the Draught of Peace, under the watchful gaze of a very tired Severus Snape. It’s a little overdosed, but it is not as if dependency and long term effects are their priorities here.</p>
<p>Lily starts humming.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>We'll drink a drink a drink</p>
<p>To lily the pink the pink the pink</p>
<p>The saviour of our human race</p>
<p>For she invented, medicinal compound</p>
<p>Most efficacious in every case</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Severus chuckles bitterly.</p>
<p>“I think the muggle kids back home will never know how right they were when they sang that to you.”</p>
<p>“I’ll have you say that my “fix-up” cakes were considered miraculous back in kindergarten, Severus Snape !”</p>
<p>“Yes, you’re probably the only witch I know whose accidental magic was in potion making.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mr freers, had sticky out ears</p>
<p>And it made him awful shy</p>
<p>And so they gave him medicinal compound</p>
<p>And now he's learning how to fly</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“You know, I think you nearly killed me with that song,” Severus says after some time.</p>
<p>“How so ?” Lily asks playfully.</p>
<p>“The Dark Lord started humming it during the last Death Eater meeting. I didn’t notice it, but after some time, I just hummed along him. I think he could have killed me with that look. It’s your work, isn’t it ?”</p>
<p>Lily laughs, and Severus thinks even dying under the Dark Lord glare was worth hearing that. He knows it is only the potion-induced euphoria, but Severus Snape learnt long ago to make lemonade with his lemons.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>When Lily Evans discovers Fleury and Blotts, she wishes never to get out again. Every wall is covered with books on Magic. Magic she could learn. Probably more than she could learn during her lifespan. Books full of Charms have little moving drawings of a wand in a hand, illustrating the wand motions of spells, and a nice lady shows her how to tap the incantations with her own wand to hear the right pronunciation. Books on Potions display the expected odour of the cauldron at the different stages of preparation.</p>
<p>Lily finds her father in a section called “Magical Theory and Arithmancy”, next to an impressive pile of grimoires. Most of them have very few illustrations, and profusion of esoteric symbols.</p>
<p>“Dad, I think these books are a bit too advanced, aren’t they ?”</p>
<p>“Huh ?” her Dad looks up from his reading. “No, those ones are for me.”</p>
<p>“For you ? But…Dad, no offence, but I’m pretty sure you can’t do Magic. Professor McGonagall said you and Mum were non-magical.”</p>
<p>“Of course, honey, I’m not planning on doing any magic. But that won’t stop me from learning the theory of it. You’re a little young to understand what it means for me, that Magic really exists. I’ve spent my whole life trying to understand how the world works, and now…all that I ever believed in is false. So I need to start again from scratch. It is both utterly disheartening and yet so exciting ! I have everything to discover anew. You’ll help me, won’t you ?”</p>
<p>---</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Lily likes math. She likes the puzzle, how all the pieces are coming together to prove her point. She likes how everything is related to any other, how with trigonometry you can navigate between calculus and geometry, how linear algebra reveals that differential equations, polynomes and sequences behave all similarly. Whenever the other Muggleborns have spotted her doing Math homework in the Library, they had always told they were happy to get rid of maths in Hogwarts. Other witches and wizards have no idea what maths even are. Lily finds it incredible that magical society could even advance that much with no math at all. The only ones that seem interested in and proficient at maths are Goblins, and it looks like it is one of their most hoarded secrets. No wonder they own the only bank.</p>
<p>When Lily’s Dad had realized there was no math curriculum at Hogwarts, he had immediately taken the situation in hand. Every Monday, Lily received a lesson plan and homework, and every Friday she sent them back for grading. With only Lily as a student, they can go as fast as they want, and by the time she has her OWLs, she is already starting university-level algebra and analysis.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Summer holidays are the occasion for father and daughter to experiment. The discussion begins even before arriving home, and it makes Petunia furious. Lily and her father spend most of their time in the laboratory set up in the attic, testing all the theories he elaborated during Lily’s school year but could not test without a magic user at home. There were some funny mishaps, like the time where they transfigured their tea cups in cute flower-painted rats. Their debates go on at every hour, and after a week, Mrs Evans usually enforce a ban on magical theory during meals. All along, Lily sees Petunia surlier and surlier, and she finds that rich, because Petunia has her dad for herself nine months out of twelve, and she is still jealous of Lily the remainder of the time.</p>
<p>During her NEWT year, when the research work is more intense, she appreciates for the first time the fountain of theoretical knowledge her father have become, and the unique perspective he has on the nature of Magic. That year, they publish their first academic article together, the one which attracts Dumbledore’s attention on her.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Suddenly, shock ejects Lily from the memory.</p>
<p>“Matthew Evans is your father ?” he asks, incredulous.</p>
<p>“Yes, why ?”</p>
<p>“The Matthew Evans that formulated the energetical theory behind Gamp’s Law ?”</p>
<p>“And the entropic theorem, and the arithmantic algorithms. I wouldn’t have thought you’d follow the academic news, what with a war to run.”</p>
<p>“But…Isn’t your father a muggle ?”</p>
<p>“Ha ! It blows your mind, doesn’t it ? A muggle, revolutionning magical theory !”</p>
<p>“But he can’t do magic !”</p>
<p>“Even a blind person can learn optics, you don’t need to be able to practice magic to understand how it works. When he needed to experiment, he had me casting the spells. My father was a physicist, it is a kind of scientist…”</p>
<p>“I know what a physicist is”, he interrupts to her surprise. “Go on.”</p>
<p>“When he learnt magic was real, all he could think about was to study it, with all the methods he knew. We invented measurements, we experimented, tested, calculated. He took a lot of concepts from muggle science, like conservation laws, algorithmic, methodology, and translated them to magical principles. He really had a genial, unique perspective on magic. Of course, your stupid Death Eater minions had to come and kill him for siring a witch, when he knew more about magic than all of them together. And to say you idiotic blood supremacists believe muggles to be little more than animals…”</p>
<p>“I don’t think Muggles are any less intelligent than wizards and witches,” he says, and she can’t quite believe it.</p>
<p>“What ?”</p>
<p>“I agree, that, individually, muggles can be as intelligent or more intelligent than us magical beings.”</p>
<p>“Then what’s your fucking problem with them ?”</p>
<p>“Language, Mrs Potter !” he scolds her. “If you had had access to more than the edulcorated propaganda the Ministry and Dumbledore diffuse about my political agenda, you’d know my “fucking problem with muggles” is more the danger they pose to our world than their supposed inferiority. Individually, muggles can be morons, geniuses, as dangerous or harmless as any magical being; yet, as a civilization, Muggles are a threat to our very existence. They wield weapons of unprecedented power of destruction. Have you ever been bombed, Mrs Potter ? I have. And it was before they invented atomic weapons, and produced so many of them they could easily destroy our planet several times and still have some to spare. Nowadays, it doesn’t even matter whether we can uphold the Statute of Secrecy, the muggle’s Mutually Assured Destruction can wipe us all in one swift swipe.”</p>
<p>“You started a war because you’re afraid of World War 3 ?”</p>
<p>“I started a war because I find unacceptable to wait for the Muggles to annihilates us with themselves, either in a Nuclear Apocalypse or by destroying the ozone shield and the rest of our ecosystem. The Statute of Secrecy as a way to protect magical beings from the Muggles is obsolete, and rather than accepting the fact and changing strategies, our government bury their heads in the sand and maintain the status quo. I refuse to let Magic die from their incompetence and cowardice.”</p>
<p>“What about the Muggleborns then ?”</p>
<p>“Muggleborns are liabilities. All their families are muggles. When the time comes to rule over Muggles, you can never know which side they will choose. For us to succeed, all muggleborns must be kept far from any influential position and be monitored to avoid defection to the muggle sides. As you can see, it is a sensible strategy, but I doubt you were presented with these arguments before. Dumbledore would rather paint me as a dangerous lunatic, an unfeeling monster and raving terrorist. He learnt well from his failures against Grindelwald: to strike your enemy, you have to think they are less than human. My followers are not cowed by fear nor craving power, they sincerely believe in our cause and trust me to carry it through. Think about it, most of them are the scions of Noble and Ancient Houses, they are rich, influential, and respected. What could they win, joining an illegal terrorist organization, risking prison, torture and death when they could enjoy a golden youth ?”</p>
<p>“If they are influential Heirs, why don’t they go political ?”</p>
<p>“They are heirs in their twenties and thirties, in a world ruled by centenarians. Wizards and witches live longer than Muggles, and the oldest ones, the likes of Dumbledore and Marchbanks, hold most of the power. People that grew up before artillery, aircraft and chemical warfare, and know little to nothing about it. My oldest followers are only in their fifties, and often two generations away from inheriting. But, even if they had this political clout, we could not campaign openly: any discourse against the Statute of Secrecy is banned since 1945. The press isn’t even allowed to tell why we are fighting. I myself was banned as a Grindelwald collaborator from holding any kind of public office.”</p>
<p>“You worked with Grindelwald ?”</p>
<p>“We corresponded. Though, from what I saw in your memories, it was a tad hypocritical from Dumbledore to condemn me on that, when he was keeping contact himself.”</p>
<p>“I can’t believe I never heard about any of this.”</p>
<p>“Think about it. Have you ever heard anyone criticizing the implementation of the Statute of Secrecy ? It makes things incredibly difficult for you Muggleborns, and yet, no debate of any kind over it ? It’s a taboo, since the 1940s in Wizarding society.”</p>
<p>“It’s a taboo for a reason. The alliance between Grindelwald and the Nazis was an abomination that sustained the Holocaust.”</p>
<p>“Grindelwald was a Seer. He knew the dangers that were coming and made what he thought was the best choice to stop atomic weapons from being invented. He failed, but the problem did not vanish with him.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know why I’d be surprised to hear you condone genocide, that’s even why I am fighting you.”</p>
<p>“I don’t, and I don’t think Grindelwald did either. It was his purpose from the start, stopping the war, and he could have succeeded, had he been able to seize control from the Muggles. But he was fighting his own war against the defenders of the Statute, a Statute that outlawed any wizard or witch trying to intervene in Muggle affairs. Grindelwald isn’t responsible for the Nazi’s actions any more than any other magical being in Europe. He may have failed, but he was right before anyone else: the Statute of Secrecy must be torn down.”</p>
<p>As she doesn’t answer, Voldement stands up and leaves the room.</p>
<p>“I’ll let you think about it, Mrs Potter.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>“How does the body survive after the Dementor's Kiss, without a soul ?”</p>
<p>“The body has a soul, it is only displaced. Everyone knows about the Dementors’s Kiss, but they usually assume it is one of their ways of feeding”, old Newt Scamander explains to Lily. “But the Dementors don’t eat souls, they eat feelings. The Kiss is instead part of their reproductive cycle: when a human is completely emptied from its positive emotions, when only the shell of them remain, the Dementor ingests the soul, and digests it, for several weeks. During that time, the magic of the Dementor keep the host body intact, in a vegetative state. When the soul is ready, there is another Kiss, to put the digested soul back into its body, and the victim becomes a newly born Dementor. It doesn't even really matter if the body dies, as long as the soul is preserved, the magic of the Dementor will make it function. I saw it happen once or twice when I was working at the Ministry. It was truly the most horrific thing I witnessed in my life, and I worked with Obscurials. The guards in Azkaban usually try to let the worse prisoners starve themselves, or kill the ones that seem too close to the state Dementors seek, to keep their population under control.”</p>
<p>“So the Kiss is a way to access the Soul”, Lily hazards.</p>
<p>“Yes, but it is true in a lot of magical contexts that are far less grim than the Dementor’s Kiss. Binding of the soul is why wedding ceremonies always include a final kiss between the spouses, to join their souls till death parts them. It is also a traditional part of fealty oath to pledge one soul to another, or during christening to bless the child’s soul. It’s the reason why you will never see a Pureblood mother not breastfeeding, since a witch’s milk is supposed to carry the mother’s magic to feed the soul of her child.”</p>
<p>“Is that why snogging is so frowned upon ? I always thought Magical Britain was mostly backwards bigots, but if a kiss can give access to the soul...”</p>
<p>“Yes, that’s why, though proper ladies would rather die than admit it aloud. A master of soul magic can do a lot of damage with one kiss. But two enthusiastic teenagers can also make quite a mess if they are careless and powerful.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>
  <em>Summertime…and the living is easy</em>
</p>
<p>Lily lays in the grass, the hot summer sun warming her cheeks and eyelids. She knows she’ll have to move soon, or her skin will be red and peeling in no time. But she stays a little longer. She lets herself be lulled by the voice of Severus, who can’t say a word in company but somehow can’t stop blathering when it’s only the two of them, as if he had to make up for his long silences. He has maybe spoken ten words to Lily in public at Hogwarts, in the ten months of their first year. And now that it’s summer again, he can’t stop. And Lily smiles, because she had worried for him.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>Fish are jumping, and the cotton is high</em>
</p>
<p>The river is deliciously fresh on Lily’s skin. She’s tried to have Severus give up and swim with her for days, and he hasn’t set more than a foot in it, regardless of the overwhelming heat. He sits very still, under the cottonwood. His cheeks are bright red, and thirteen year old Lily thinks it’s because of the heat.</p>
<p>But Severus doesn’t join her, so she gets out of the water, and she jumps on him so that he’s drenched. They are very close now, and Lily raises her eyes to meet his. She kisses him, and he tastes like summer.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>Your dad is rich, and your Ma is good looking</em>
</p>
<p>“Of course, Potter is popular, he’s a prefect and a rebel, he’s brilliant and iconoclast, well-born and wealthy, surely he’s entitled to the most beautiful girl in the whole school. How could I compete, a slimy Slytherin, against His Highness Potter ? How presumptuous of me, to claim friendship because we’ve known each other for most of our lives ?”</p>
<p>“It’s not about Potter, Severus, don’t you get it ? It’s about you and the other Slytherins, and how you are around them. All this hiding, and secret rendez-vous, and façade of indifference. I’m sick of being your dirty little secret ! You don’t want to admit to seeing a Muggleborn, that’s all ! You can talk about entitlement, but I am not good enough for you apparently.”</p>
<p>“Lily…”</p>
<p>“No. No more. Either you publicly acknowledge me, or we’re over, Severus. Now, you’ll excuse me, I have OWLs tomorrow and I need to study.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>So hush, little baby, don’t you cry</em>
</p>
<p>Harry is so tiny, and he cries so loudly at night, Lily’s thinks she’s going to lose it sometimes. He cries for hours on the evenings, for no reason at all, and the books and her mum say it’s normal, but what if it isn’t ? What if there is something wrong with Harry ? Probably he feels how worried they are, permanently, because of the thrice damned prophecy, and Voldemort chasing them. And how sad his mum is, being betrayed like that by her oldest friend. She had known Severus for so long, or she had thought she did, but she probably hadn’t because her Severus would not give his soul to Voldemort. Her Severus wasn’t keen on admitting he was fancying a Muggleborn to her Slytherin friends, and Lily had felt betrayed he’d rather dump her than acknowledge her, but he wouldn’t make an unborn child the target of a deadly Dark wizard. Except that he had, and now she had to admit that she had probably never known him at all. She’d only seen what she wanted to.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>And suddenly, instead of Louis Armstrong answering Ella Fitzgerald, it was a woman’s voice, a little raw and full of Cockney accent.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>One of these mornings, you’re gonna rise up singing</em>
</p>
<p>With no lights at all, London looks like a phantom town. The small column of orphans, following sleepily to shelters in their white pajamas are the wraiths, and the raid alert sirens are the banshees. Tom thinks that maybe they are already dead, killed by a bomb falling on the orphanage, but their ghosts don’t know it so they are all still walking to the underground for shelter. How would it feel, to die in one’s sleep ? How do I know I am alive ?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>You’ll spread your wings, and you’ll take to the sky</em>
</p>
<p>Tom grabs the wand and he feels the warm welcome of the phoenix feather, rushing from his hand to his heart. The magic takes life around him, dancing and singing in happiness. Tom feels as if he has been in the penumbra for all his life and suddenly there’s light, and for the first time he can see colors and shapes where there was only shadows. As if he’d been underwater and how he can hear. As if he’d been chained to the ground and now he can fly. And he wonders if it feels like coming home, except that he doesn’t know how it feels to come home for he never had one. Every dream becomes possible, because magic is might.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>But till that morning, there ain’t nothing can harm you</em>
</p>
<p>Tom Riddle is alone in the dark, and he wonders how long he’s been there since the underground shelter collapsed on them. Days probably, but how many ? All the others are dead now. Mathilda was the first, half her body crushed by the stones and the life seeping slowly out of her body as she bled. Georges was concussed, and he had drifted to unconsciousness. Edith had been the last. She’d been wounded though not mortally. But with the fetid water of the sewers dampening the ground, her wounds had festered and she had gone burning with fever and delirious. Tom had attempted all he could to save her, not that he really cared, he only didn’t want to be alone in the dark. He only has a rudimentary knowledge of healing spells, and most of them don’t work on muggles. Now he is surrounded by rotting corpses of other children. In the beginning, he kept seeing or hearing them move and it freaked him out. Lately, he started to feel protected by them, as if their death, their sacrifice, would protect him. Their lives fed the dark, and now it wouldn’t swallow Tom.</p>
<p>Tom keeps moving his wand, muttering what must be the ten thousandth Levitation spell. It is the first they teach at Hogwarts, so ridiculously easy to get that Tom had known how to perform it wandlessly and wordlessly for years before he even learnt he was a wizard. Levitating heavy boulders, hour after hour, day after day in the fainter and fainter light of a Lumos, is as different from that Levitation spell as lifting concrete blocks is from playing with building blocks. Tom is tiring, and he is not even certain he digs in the right direction. He can conjure water, and once again he is so glad to know so many more spells than what he should as a third year, but magic can’t provide any kind of food. He’s thirteen and he doesn’t want to die, buried alive by a stupid Muggle war he has no part of, forgotten by all.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>With daddy and mammy standing by</em>
</p>
<p>Tom Riddle stands over the corpse of a man who looks exactly like himself, albeit older. How stupid, how weak he had been, to have thought that his father had only not known he had a son, to have hoped he would care. Even after the love potion, Tom Riddle Senior had remembered Merope was pregnant. Even if he hadn’t, the orphanage had contacted him, for Merope had given his name and address before she died. His mother had still hoped Riddle would welcome his son, even though he didn’t want to see the mother ever again. How would it have been to grow up here, in the manor, with a father and grandparents ? Would his father have hated Tom anyway, as he brimmed with magic before he could even talk ? He’d never know, and he doesn’t want to. Tom lifts his hand, and his new ring shines in the light. His father never loved him, but he had sacrificed his life to protect Tom’s forever. It doesn’t matter if it was not willingly, as it doesn’t matter that he’d become a father unwillingly. Now Merope is avenged, and Tom is safe.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Lily comes back to herself as the song is ending. Those were not her memories anymore. Were they Voldemort’s ? Memories of the Blitz, of little Tom Riddle. Memories of death and power. Horcrux, the reason why Voldemort has not been killed by the rebounding Killing Curse. Where is the ring now ?</p>
<p>Voldemort is still lost in his thoughts, humming softly the lullaby. Maybe the focus has shifted to his memories because his were more powerfully associated with the song ? Suddenly, he looks up to her eyes.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“<em>Obliviate</em>”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Lily is fiddling with her ring, to forget her empty, doorless room. It’s her wedding ring, she’s sure of it. She’s Mrs Potter. But who is M. Potter ? She can’t remember. It’s on the tip of her tongue. How can she not remember her own husband ? She can’t remember her wedding day either. It dances at the edge of her perceptions. She knows who would have been there, she can guess, but no memory of it. Only red eyes and a violent rage. She’d have to ask Severus, he should have been there, she had always been sure he would be her best man.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>“Do you know why you are still alive, Mrs Potter ?” Voldemort asks one day.</p>
<p>“Because you still need answers from me I hope, but it could be for your entertainment for all I know.”</p>
<p>“That’s not untrue, you still have much information I need, but let me rephrase my question. Do you know why I did not kill you that day in Godric’s Hollow ?”</p>
<p>Lily doesn’t really know what to say. He let her live because she failed, because he could see through her trap.</p>
<p>He chuckles.</p>
<p>“Sometimes, you give me too much credit my dear. I would have normally executed you so fast I couldn’t even have thought there was a trap. What made me wonder was your desperate look when I offered you to save yourself. But do you know why I offered in the first place ?”</p>
<p>Lily doesn’t want to know. Of course the Dark Lord never cares.</p>
<p>“It was Severus. I owed him, for bringing me the prophecy, even incomplete. When it became evident that your son was the one, he was very distressed. He begged me, on his knees, to change my course. Nothing would have prevented me from eliminating the threat, but I agreed that your life could be spared. Ironic, how poisonous love can be, isn’t it ?”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>
  <em>The fundamental truth is that Magic is in the caster. The focus of a spell can be any kind of act from the magical being casting the Magic. All it needs is the symbol. It doesn’t matter whether it is a word and a wand movement, a rune, stirring a potion clockwise and counterclockwise or riding a broom. What matters for the Magic is the symbolic value of the act. That’s why spells are mostly in dead languages. The words of Latin have been spoken for longer than any modern english words, and Magic remembers. The older the language, the more powerful the words.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>What most wizards and witches do not realize though, is that every single one of their actions is a magical act. They think about it only when they want an answer from Magic, but they are magical beings, and magic infuses all their lives. Old magical families teach the importance of symbols and rituals in everyday life, where muggleborns can go from faux pas to faux pas and send their magic in disarray. They teach the fundamental importance of life debts, the relevance of referring to people by their rightful names and titles, and how to choose your words to avoid committing perjury.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>At the time of the Founders, this kind of Magic permeated the life of witches and wizards. The Fidelius Charm is about the magic in hiding and telling a secret. It tells us that there is protection in confiding our secrets in the ones we love.</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Albus Dumbledore, preface to “The Fidelius Charm, a Thesis on the Coincidental Magic of keeping a secret” by Lily Evans Potter</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>The next time Lily is alone with Severus, she nearly succeeds in killing him. He does not really resist, he seems to agree she deserves to be the one to end him. It’s only by chance that the Dark Lord happens to double back and find her, sat on the chest of a bluish Severus, strangling him with all the bottled rage she never could let out.</p>
<p>He looks furious at both of them, but Lily starts to know the Dark Lord enough to guess a devilish proud smile on his features, when he Crucioes her to unconsciousness.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>“You know, I think this spell is cursed,” the beautiful ghost of Helena Ravenclaw tells Lily. “That’s why they stopped using it. I don’t think you should start digging it out again. Everytime it has been used, tragedy has followed. I used it to hide my mother’s diadem, and I was murdered for it. Godric used it to hide his children, and they all died. The magic of the spell makes the secret alive, and it wants to be known. It wants to break free, and it will kill for that, either the Keeper or the Kept.”</p>
<p>“Confirmation bias”, Lily answers. “You cannot hear about the times the Fidelius actually worked as intended, because it is secret. And no one uses a Fidelius unless their situation is dire. The probability for one of the persons involved to die from unnatural causes, when all of them are already in danger in the first place, is very high. That does not make the Fidelius the cause of their demise.”</p>
<p>“My intuition tells me there is something more. A force of the fate that rejects the limitation of secrecy.”</p>
<p>“Then I will research. I am not seeking to use the spell, this is an academic work about one of the most powerful charms in coincidental magic. My purpose is knowledge.”</p>
<p>Rowena Ravenclaw smiles with melancholy. She knows the power of curiosity, and even a thousand years after her death, she can still feel its call.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>When Lily wakes up, Severus is gone, and she feels awful. Her whole body is so weak she doubts she can sit, much less stand. Her head pounds and her mouth is so dry she can feel her lips bleed when she moves them. A rat moves in the corner of the room, and she instantly knows who it is. She stares at him, and Peter Pettigrew replaces the rodent to bring her a much needed glass of water.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“You had a seizure”, he explains with a contrite voice. “I was ordered to watch in case you have another.”</p>
<p>Lily looks at him hard, and she knows the Dark Lord is playing with them. He could have assigned a Death Eater unknown to Lily, but he chose to replace one traitor with the other. Unfortunately, unlike Snape, Pettigrew doesn’t even have the sense to keep quiet.</p>
<p>“I am sorry, Lily, I truly am.”</p>
<p>“And I truly don’t care, Wormtail. You betrayed us, like the spineless coward you have always been, but the worst is that you betrayed us long ago. You smiled to our faces, you held Harry in your arms, just as you were plotting how to have us all murdered ! While all along you were whoring yourself to Voldemort so that you could save your worthless hide !”</p>
<p>“Coward ! Weak ! Stupid ! Pitiful !” He spits. “That’s all you lot ever thought about me didn’t you ? Because I’m shy, because I’m reserved, because I don’t boast over my magical talent, everyone forgets that I am as much a Gryffindor as any of you. Maybe I am not brash as Sirius, or reckless as James, or brave as Remus. But the Hat told me that I belonged to Gryffindor because I had the courage to do what needs to be done. You have no idea, all that one can see when they are the vermin of the world, when they can enter anywhere unseen, unnoticed. The Muggles are going to annihilate themselves and us with them, that much is certain, we only don’t know when. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in ten or fifty years, it doesn’t matter. Lord Voldemort is the only one willing to stop pretending that we are not sitting on a ticking bomb that could blow off at any moment. For years, I’ve tried to pretend I couldn’t do anything about it, that it was not my fight, that my friends were worth more to me than my convictions. But I got sick of lying to myself, I had enough that you all were ready to see me die for your ideals, when I wouldn’t do anything for mine.”</p>
<p>“Oh please, don’t make it political Wormtail. We were not soldiers fighting on different sides of a war, not this time. We were a family hiding to protect their child, and you betrayed us. It was personal. If you had only wanted to switch sides, you could have done it without spying on us. You could have announced it fair and square, you didn’t need to become our Secret Keeper. You chose to wield our friendship as a weapon.”</p>
<p>“I never intended to be the Secret Keeper. I wasn’t even supposed to know about the Fidelius, and I was glad about it because then I wouldn’t have to choose ! And then, Sirius came with his grand idea, the ultimate bluff: making me the Secret Keeper at the last minute, without telling anyone. It had Sirius’ paw prints all over it, it was utterly reckless, and it had the advantage to shield him from taking any responsibility, as usual. And as always, they didn’t care I didn’t want to do it, they didn’t care they were destroying my life doing so, they just used our friendship as an excuse to have me paint a target on my back. So tell me, Lily, who exactly was wielding friendship as a weapon then, when Sirius and James were trying to make sure it was the friend they liked the less that was going to be sacrificed to your safety ? Do you know why I accepted, in the end ? So I could at least save Sirius. Had I refused, Sirius would have done it, and he would have died to protect you, I have no doubt. You would have been discovered eventually, and there was nothing I could do about it, whereas if I was the Secret Keeper, then Sirius could be saved.”</p>
<p>“Saved ? You framed him ! You sent him to rot in Azkaban for the rest of his life !”</p>
<p>“That wasn’t supposed to happen ! Yes, I framed him to escape. But the Ministry was supposed to investigate ! Sirius was supposed to claim his innocence, and be interrogated, and the truth would have emerged. Fuck, how was I supposed to know he wouldn’t even get a trial ? I didn’t send Sirius to Azkaban, Bartemius fucking Crouch did, like he sent his own son to die there ! The Ministry doesn’t even pretend to respect the rule of law ! And Dumbledore, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, doesn’t even blink ! It is his duty to make sure Sirius has a trial, but he won’t move. Dumbledore betrayed Sirius more than I ever did ! He betrayed Sirius, and he betrayed you, Lily. He knows you’re here, he has known from the beginning, and decided that rescuing you was not worth the risk.”</p>
<p>“And he’s right. I am certainly not worth the risk, he knows it, I know it, and I knew the risks when I joined the Order. I have no one left anyway, and no one needs me.”</p>
<p>It’s the truth, but it still hurts. Lily doesn’t want to live anymore anyway, and she deserves the pain she gets at the hands of Voldemort, because she failed Harry. But she can’t stop from feeling disappointed that her old professor, with whom she spent years researching the magic of the Fidelius, her mentor, would abandon her to torture and death at the hand of the enemy.</p>
<p>“You don’t deserve to die, Lily.”</p>
<p>Peter struggles, as if he wants to say something more but can’t. He sighs.</p>
<p>“I have not given up of you, Lily. You’re still my friend. Hold on a little more, please. It’ll be worth it, I swear.”</p>
<p>He goes, and Lily doesn’t know if she wants him to be wrong or right.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Lily walks in Godric’s Hollow cemetery, and her feet leave quiet footprints in the snow. She’s under James’ Cloak, it is not safe for her to get out of the house without it. But her patience with her baby had ran out, and James had sent her out to regain her composure. No one ever tells you that, when you’re expecting, how you can love your child with all your heart, but still lose all your patience with them. She stops in front of two tombstones, surprised at the familiar name. Ariana and Kendra Dumbledore. Who are they to Albus ? The dates would suggest a mother and sister, but they could be as easily an aunt and cousin. Fourteen, she calculated from Ariana’s birth and death dates. Albus would have been barely an adult. What tragedy had plagued her mentor’s family ? Is it the reason behind the very tense relationship he has with his brother Aberforth ? She realizes know she barely knows him. She knows his academic accomplishments, but what about the ones he has loved, the ones he has lost ? She has only ever seen him alone, powerful and aloof.</p>
<p>She does not hear Bathilda coming behind her, and nearly falls when the old witch starts talking.</p>
<p>“Lily, is that you ?”</p>
<p>“How did you guess ?”</p>
<p>“The footprints. They’re too small to be James', and I don’t know anyone else who would need to hide themselves. What are you doing here ?”</p>
<p>“I needed some calm. Harry is teething, and it makes him very grumpy. So James told me to go for a walk. Do you know who they are ? The two women buried here.”</p>
<p>“Kendra and Ariana ? Did Albus never tell you about them ?”</p>
<p>Lily shakes her head, and then remembers she is invisible.</p>
<p>“No. He is not very forthcoming with anything personal.”</p>
<p>“I can’t blame him, it is not a very pleasant story to recall. Kendra was Albus’ mother, Ariana was his sister. The Dumbledores moved in Godric’s Hollow after little Ariana had been severely abused by Muggles. Percival, their father, had been sent to Azkaban for avenging his daughter, and Kendra found herself alone to raise two headstrong teenagers and a traumatized little girl, with no income. Albus was already brilliant at that age, of course, but he listened to no one, he always knew better. He would drive Kendra crazy. Aberforth was full of ideas more ridiculous than the other, and would never hear no as an answer. Ariana…she was afraid of everything and everyone, poor thing, and her magic could escape her in an instant. That’s what killed Kendra in the end.”</p>
<p>“Ariana killed her mother ?”</p>
<p>“No, Ariana lost control of her magic, and it killed her mother. After that, Albus and Aberforth were responsible for her. It was a hard wake up call for both of them, but especially for Albus. After Kendra’s death, he was the head of the family, responsible for his headstrong brother and his crazy little sister who had killed their mother. Ariana would not let anyone but her brothers near her, and she needed constant supervision. Until Aberforth was of age, Albus had no choice but to be at home, living off the meager savings left of the Dumbledores fortune. Poor lad, he had so much ambition at that time, dreams bigger than life, they were always talking and writing to each other with my nephew Gellert.”</p>
<p>“Gellert…as in Gellert Grindelwald ?”</p>
<p>“The very same. They were always discussing about the Statute of Secrecy, the Muggle technology, the future, and the greater good. All day long and then they were sending each other owls at all hours in the night. It was love at first sight, they were so cute together when they thought nobody was watching. They were fascinated with the Muggle Industrial Revolution, and wanted to start a Wizarding equivalent. They wanted to change the world, and look where it got them.”</p>
<p>“What happened ?”</p>
<p>“I don't know exactly. I know the three of them had a row about Ariana's future. At one point, curses were exchanged, and Ariana, being what she was, lost control and died. Gellert left, Albus and Abertforth went their own way. Gellert never lost the faith in the ideas he had built with Albus, as we all know. Most people think he never set foot in Britain because he was afraid of Albus, but I think it was because he still loved him. What a shame. I don't thinks Albus ever stopped hating himself, for Ariana's death and for condemning Gellert to a life in Nurmengard.”</p>
<p>“Is that why it took Dumbledore so long to oppose Grindelwald ?”</p>
<p>“Partly. Gellert told me most of the best ideas he tried to enforce were Albus' and in my opinion, Albus was waiting to see if Gellert could succeed. Some part of him still believed. He intervened only when all was lost in the Muggle war.”</p>
<p>“Albus Dumbledore is an abolitionist ?”</p>
<p>The Statute of Secrecy is one of the biggest taboo of Wizarding politics. Advocating publicly for its abolition had been banned during Grindelwald's war, and never authorized again. For the Head of the Wizengamot to be an abolitionist was unthinkable.</p>
<p>“Why do you think he is so insistent on Muggleborn inclusion and Muggle fraternization ? He's doing what he can to slowly bring the Wizarding Culture where it would want to reconcile with the Muggle World. Gellert and him never stopped agreeing on the ends, only on the means.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Lily sees the tall man with red eyes enter her room, and she forgets what she was doing.</p>
<p>“May I help you ?” She asks.</p>
<p>“How polite”, he says pleasantly. “What a change from last time !”</p>
<p>“I'm sorry have we met before ?”</p>
<p>He looks at her, puzzled.</p>
<p>“If that's the case, I'm confused, I can't remember your name.”</p>
<p>He smiles and presents her his hand.</p>
<p>“You may call me Tom.”</p>
<p>She smiles and shakes his hand.</p>
<p>“Nice to meet you Tom, I'm Lily.”</p>
<p>“Thank you Lily. May I ask what you are reading ?”</p>
<p>“Magick Moste Evile, from Godelot. The book itself is pretty gruesome, but he had a very innovative way of presenting Dark Arts Theory for his time. Though I liked Secrets of the Darkest Arts better. Owle Bullock was not as great a spellcrafter, but he has a clarity Godelot clearly lacked.”</p>
<p>“Godelot was certainly an innovator, but he never understood Soul Magic and it shows”, he agrees. “I had the chance of discussing Secrets of the Darkest Arts with Bullock itself. His theoretical knowledge on Dark and Soul Magic was, at the time, unsurpassed. But I'm confused on why you would read Dark Arts, I was certain your area of expertise was more Coincidental Magic.”</p>
<p>“Coincidental Magic was a medieval art that permeates the magic of all spellcasters of this era. It was the central part of Magical Theory at the time, and the whole philosophy of medieval witches and wizards revolved around the idea of Fate as presented by Coincidental Magic. And indeed, Godelot was very inventive in merging it with Dark Arts .”</p>
<p>“Godelot I can conceive, but Bullock was a man of the nineteenth century. Why Secrets of the Darkest Arts then ? The book is pretty obscure, if you pardon me the word. Where did you even find it ?”</p>
<p>“You probably won't believe me, but it was in Dumbledore's office”, she says maliciously. “I needed some Soul Magic theory for a pet project.”</p>
<p>He raises an eyebrow.</p>
<p>“It sounds interesting, what kind of pet project ?”</p>
<p>“You know what ? I don't even remember, she says, dismissive. “Probably not important. A kind of ward, I think, based on a medieval artifact.”</p>
<p>“Do you remember what kind of artifact ?”</p>
<p>“An invisibility cloak.” she answers, absent.</p>
<p>The man ponders her answer for a few minutes.</p>
<p>“Can you tell me more about the cloak ?”</p>
<p>“Excuse me what cloak ?”</p>
<p>“The cloak we were just discussing. The one from your pet project”, he pressed her.</p>
<p>“Listen, I don't know you, I don't know what you want, and I don't really care. Now will you please leave me alone ?”</p>
<p>He looks at her weirdly, and go. Good riddance. Who the hell was that guy anyway ?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>
  <em>Dear Lily,</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <em>To most of your questions, I can only answer that you should trust your instincts, for they will bring you far. You probably expected more information from me; alas even with Albus’ authorization, my vows only let me tell so much.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>People usually believe Seers see the future, sometimes different versions of the future. They digress on the meaning of free will against fate. But most Seers are poor sorcerers, and most great scholars have no Sight at all. From one who is both, I can tell you, they are all wrong. Seers are not passive recipients of the future. The Sight is a magical act, and as such it leaves an imprint of our will on the nature of reality.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Regretfully, I cannot reveal more than that without triggering my vows. Please feel free to keep sending your insightful ideas at this poor hermit. After a century, one tires on the shenanigans of Albus Dumbledore, and the decades of isolation are not improving the matter.</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Magically yours,</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Gellert Grindelwald</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>“Peter ?”</p>
<p>“Yes, Lily ?”</p>
<p>“Can you tell me a story about James ?”</p>
<p>“What do you mean ?”</p>
<p>“I mean a memory, a story of something the two of you did together, maybe when you were at school.”</p>
<p>“Why do you ask ?”</p>
<p>“I...My memories are not what they used to be. Some have been damaged. I think it would help me remember.”</p>
<p>Peter takes some time to ponder before beginning.</p>
<p>“Do you remember the time James was followed by a cat at Hogwarts, and couldn't get rid of it ? He'd found it under his bed, in our dormitory. As soon as he had entered, the cat had sprung on him. We were having a secret Marauder meeting, and he had to play with the cat for all the meeting. Afterwards, the cat disappeared, and all our pranks this week were a disaster. James and Sirius were caught, and McGonagall gave them detention till the end of the school year.”</p>
<p>“Yes, I remember him complaining again and again, it was unfair and she couldn't prove they were guilty. He even went to Dumbledore to try and get the detentions cancelled. Can't remember what came of it.”</p>
<p>“James probably never told you, he only told us years later. So, James was called to Dumbledore's office, and when he arrives, Dumbedore is petting a cat, and not any cat : the cat. And then Dumbledore says : "Minerva, if you please ?" and the cat turns into the professor ! She'd been spying on Marauder meetings all week long, that's how she knew how to catch James and Sirius. James was so embarrassed, he only told us it hadn't worked. But in the end, that's what gave him the idea of becoming Animagus for Remus.”</p>
<p>“Thank you. I still remember him, but everything feels so wrong. Sometimes, I can remember what happened but none of the feelings of it. Other times I remember I love him, but I have no idea who he was. My memories are shattered, scattered, and all I can do is look at the pieces and try to fit them back together one by one. My love for Harry is the only thing he could not touch, it’s my anchor, the last part of me I have left. I am but a remnant, the shell of the mother of Harry Potter. I have nothing left to look for. If you are still my friend, Peter, if the years we have spent together were not a lie, please, please have mercy. Please kill me now, so that I can finally rest with James and Harry.”</p>
<p>“I can’t,” he whines.</p>
<p>“Why, because your allegiance to Voldemort means more than our friendship ?” she snaps. “Your master doesn’t need me any more. The intelligence I still have is not that valuable. Please, Peter. You owe me. Let me rejoin my baby.”</p>
<p>“Lily I can’t, I…”</p>
<p>He takes something out of his inner pocket. It’s an envelope, containing a photograph. Of Harry. He looks a little older than when she left her last kiss on his forehead. Where she kissed him, he has a lightning-shaped scar. After a few seconds, the photograph burst into flames.</p>
<p>“He’s not dead, Lily. Harry’s not dead.”</p>
<p>“Harry is alive ? How ?”</p>
<p>“I don’t know if you can really say he is alive. He’s not dead, but not really alive either, like the Dark Lord.”</p>
<p>Neither can live while the other survives…</p>
<p>“One of Dumbledore’s theories is that they are in, how did he say again ? In a superpositioned state, dead and alive at the same time like the Schröding Shire’s Cat. Something about muggle physics. That when one of them will be really alive or dead, it will change the state of the other, even though he doesn’t know in which way. I don’t know where he gets those nonsensical ideas.”</p>
<p>“Superposed. Like Schrödinger’s cat. That’s Quantum Physics, I taught him that. That’s an interesting way of putting it.”</p>
<p>
  <em>The future is too constrained. For the moment, there is no future where either of them is alive or dead that can fulfil all the conditions that have to be validated. So the universe can’t decide. We checkmated the future.</em>
</p>
<p>“Who knows ?” she asks.</p>
<p>“Dumbledore. Hagrid. I don’t know who has taken him in, just that Dumbledore said they had the strongest blood wards that could be built. Hagrid provides unicorn milk for Harry. He was the one who got Harry from your house. I think maybe Sirius knows. That could be why Dumbledore is not keen on getting him out of Azkaban.”</p>
<p>“Voldemort. Does he know ?”</p>
<p>“No. I can’t tell him, there’s a Fidelius. I am not the Secret Keeper, Dumbledore is. The photo I gave you, it was given to me by Dumbledore. I was supposed to wait for his signal, and give it to Snape, to lure Voldemort into a trap. But I couldn’t...Lily you need to be strong, you need to hold on for him. I couldn’t let you waste away like that.”</p>
<p>“What can we do ? She stops and her eyes open wide. “Oh no, you told me and he’ll know ! Next time the Dark Lord invades my mind, he’ll see.”</p>
<p>“But, the Fidelius...”</p>
<p>“It doesn’t work like that. I am not the Secret Keeper, so I couldn't tell him, even if I wanted to. But he'll see that I changed, that I don't believe my son is dead.”</p>
<p>“Then you need to tell him all he wants, so that he won't need Legillimency.”</p>
<p>“He won't care what I want. He'll do it anyway.”</p>
<p>“Severus and I can convince him. Your mental health is precarious enough that Snape already told him off your mind. If you swear a vow to answer all his questions truthfully, the Dark Lord can probably be convinced to stop Legillimency.”</p>
<p>“If he asks me whether Harry is alive, the conflict between the Fidelius and the vow could kill me.”</p>
<p>“He has no reason to ask.”</p>
<p>Lily stops to consider. She sees no other option. She nods, and Peter leaves her.</p>
<p>For the first time in weeks, she has hope and it's terrifying. She would have thought she'd revel in the news her son is the alive. But all she's able to see is that she could lose him again. If he's alive, then he can die again, and she can't even protect him. For the first time, she really feels powerless.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>“I want to make a deal”, Lily announces as soon as Voldemort walks through the door.</p>
<p>“So Severus told me. What did you have in mind ? Why the sudden change of mind ?”</p>
<p>“I'm...loosing myself. Severus tells me most of the time I don't know who I am or what I am doing. I don't want to end that way. So I'll swear a vow to tell you everything you want to know, to answer every question, truthfully and without omission.”</p>
<p>“And in exchange ?”</p>
<p>“No more legillimency. No Veritaserum. Nothing that touches my mind. And when I've answered all your questions, you kill me. I want it to be over, and I want to die being myself.”</p>
<p>“And if I refuse ?”</p>
<p>“Then I'll loose my sanity and you'll never have your answers.”</p>
<p>“For all I know, your sanity is heavily damaged already. I have no guaranty you are still able to answer my questions.”</p>
<p>“Severus found a way to restore me. At least enough so I can tell you what you want to know.”</p>
<p>“Prove it. Give me something now, and I'll consider it.”</p>
<p>Lily examines her options carefully.</p>
<p>“There was a trap, as you already guessed. But it didn't work as planned. I think the trap interfered with another spell, or ward, or ritual, or maybe several and destabilized them. If we want to understand what happened, then we need to find out which spells interacted. Is that enough for you ?”</p>
<p>Voldemort watches her intently, and maybe she imagines the corner of his mouth smiling a little.</p>
<p>“Clever. Enough so that I am curious, but vague enough so that I need you to provide detailed information to get further.”</p>
<p>“Very well, Mrs Potter, we'll swear the vow. Prepare your answers.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Lord Voldemort points the blackboard, half covered by complex arithmantic equations and elaborate diagrams.</p>
<p>“Here are all the spells I cast that were active at the moment of the catastrophic interaction. I want you to similarly write down all the characteristics of the spells that you had active in the room, no matter how trivial: wards, enchanted objects, personal spells.”</p>
<p>Lily glances at the dark wizard’s side of the blackboard and freeze.</p>
<p>“You were making a Horcrux”, she says flatly, and Voldemort is suddenly looking at her with a curious mix of shock, incredulity and some sort of twisted delight.</p>
<p>“My my, Dumbledore’s Golden Girl, his apprentice in all but in name, dabbling in the Darkest Magic, who would have guessed ? You don’t only know the concept, you are familiar enough with the formalism to recognize at first sight an unconventional formulation. I guess the only reason your soul is still whole is that one cannot make a Horcrux for someone else.”</p>
<p>“I wouldn’t bet on it. I find that when people label things as impossible, they usually only lack imagination.”</p>
<p>Voldemort chuckles.</p>
<p>“Is that what you tried ? Is it what interfered with the creation of the last of my Horcruxes ?”</p>
<p>“Horcruxes ?” she gasps. “You made several ? That’s not supposed to be possible, the first is too unstable.”</p>
<p>“Or previous dark practitioners lacked the imagination”, he answered, grinning. “That, and the theoretical tools arithmancers developed during the nineteenth century allowed me to calculate the exact stability for multiple Horcruxes that had to be approximated before.”</p>
<p>The Dark Lord starts to fill the blackboard with a series of formulas and diagrams.</p>
<p>“Here are the exact stabilities for when one makes the first and second Horcruxes. As you said, the first is barely stable, and after that the second split is so unstable the immediate backlash would destroy the soul. However, if you forget the process of making the Horcruxes, and just make the calculations, you can see that a three-piece soul is actually more stable than a soul split in two, because three is a more powerful magical number here than two. What makes the creation of the third Horcrux so volatile is not the three pieces, it is the second split.”</p>
<p>Lily’s mind is racing, elated, to fill the gap. As always, she is quickly forgetting how Dark the magic is, because there is a mystery of nature to understand, a fundamental truth of magic to unravel.</p>
<p>“But if you divide the soul into three parts in one split, you can bypass the limit”, she whispers.</p>
<p>That was pure genius. Voldemort had such an intuitive grasp at what the behaviour of soul magic should be, that he had felt that the impossibility of the second Horcrux was not logical. He had looked at the problem with a completely new angle, because he understood the magic so well he could not believe what the arithmancy said. He knew the theory was biased by the untold assumption that Horcruxes should be made sequentially.</p>
<p>“Would it work ?” she asks excitedly, all awareness of who she is talking to forgotten.</p>
<p>“It did work”, he answered with a smug smile. “I made my first two Horcruxes when I was sixteen. I only needed to murder more than once, so that the multiple split could occur.”</p>
<p><em>Sixteen</em>. How brilliant one had to be, to understand the laws of magic so well at sixteen ? And how twisted one’s mind had to be, for this brilliance to focus on murder and soul mutilation ? What had happened to the teenage boy that made him so familiar with death, with his own mortality, that he would feel the compulsion to mutilate himself to survive ? Dumbledore had painted the image of a madman, a blood-thirsty charismatic Dark wizard, but had given no hint of the man behind Lord Voldemort, of the child and teenager he had been. She didn’t even know how old he was. Lily had always thought he was some kind of arrogant pureblood heir, as most of the higher level Death Eaters were. But the little pieces she has gathered, so close to the man during her captivity, do not fit that assumption at all. He knows what a physicist is, he has recognized the mathematical muggle notations. When he is angry, she can hear a faint Cockney accent. He has probably been raised by working-class muggles in London, far from the pureblood circles of Wizarding Britain. He has known muggle warfare personally. She would wager he has lived through the Blitz in London. A young wizard lost in a muggle war ? Is that where his obsession with death comes from, where his will to subdue muggles comes from ?</p>
<p>Oblivious, the Dark Lord keeps writing on the board.</p>
<p>“If you keep developing the stabilities, you can see the four and five-pieces souls are highly unstable. However, stability increases again with the sixth part, and the seven-part soul is nearly as stable as an intact one. The third to fifth Horcruxes thus have to be created together, but the sixth should be independent. I was in the process of making my sixth and last Horcrux when the… instability happened.”</p>
<p>Reality slams Lily’s mind like a truck crushing a rabbit on a motorway. When in her brain, the words “the process of making my sixth and last Horcrux” suddenly translates to “murdering your innocent, defenseless baby boy”. Her heart is crushed again with pain, with the powerlessness, with the all-encompassing guilt of failure. Harry is not dead, a small reassuring voice murmurs in her heart. She can still save him, she has to. She cannot fail again, she cannot mourn him twice. She has always thought she was ready to sacrifice anything for her son. But it is really different to have sacrificed everything, and found out it was not enough.</p>
<p>“Mrs Potter !” The voice is imperious, and more than annoyed. Lily snaps back to reality. Voldemort has been talking to her and she has not processed a single word.</p>
<p>“You swore to give me all the information needed to understand what happened on that night, and to do everything in you power to solve it. This is the last time I ask you: describe all the active magic present in the room that night.”</p>
<p>Funny, how the Dark Lord seems as reluctant as herself to name what happened. Neither of them says the words. They have yet to speak Harry’s name. They have yet to say anyone has died.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Lily makes a quick list of the things she remembers being cast in Harry’s nursery, monitoring charms, Self-Cleaning nappies, the wards on the cradle, the Cat-Repelling wards on the door, the musical nightlight. She is concentrating on the list, as emotionally detached from reality as she can. Keep technical, do not think on whose room it was. Snape’s techniques help, all her feelings enclosed in little bottles, neatly aligned on shelves. Examine the facts, but do not think about what they mean. She breathes slowly, and attacks the transcription of the Peverell Wards.</p>
<p>It is a long and complex piece of work, even in the condensed notations she is using. Instinctively, she starts presenting the charm theory as she is writing it, as if exposing a NEWT research project to an ominous examiner. The fear disappears as the habits from a life as an academic kicked in.</p>
<p>“The central part of the ward’s design is derived from a piece of very ancient charms discovered on a Potter family heirloom from the Peverell line, that seemed to protect its owner from death. The heirloom in its original design is supposed to be part of a set, and because of that, the charm is incomplete and the protection not fully active. How familiar are you with coincidental magic ?” Lily asks without realising whom she is addressing. Coincidental magic is a pretty obscure branch of charms after all, nearly abandoned after the Middle Ages, because it is by nature unpredictable.</p>
<p>Voldemort raises a deadpanned eyebrow at the nervous young witch.</p>
<p>“I am not sure, how many Defense of the Dark Arts teachers have you had during your time at Hogwarts ?” He asks, amused.</p>
<p>Lily stares at him. The Dark Lord is joking. About the curse he is rumoured to have cast on the Defense Position so that no professor could stay more than one year. It is a textbook example of coincidental magic: the jinx does not specify the way the Defense professor would be unable to take the job for a second year, only that they could not. The Magic of the spell would find a way to make it true, but no one could predict how. That is what makes the spell so clever: the more the Defense professor is trying to fight the curse and stay for another year, the less possibilities they leave for the curse to stop them. Until the simplest way for the spell to work is to kill them. There had been several deaths in the first years, before people started to suspect something unnatural was at work. Nowadays, the wise Defense teachers plan to stay only one year, satisfying the curse’s requirements in less lethal ways.</p>
<p>Voldemort is smirking at her, and that is pretty terrifying. Lily looks at the board again and focus on magical theory. Better than the Dark Lord’s sense of humour.</p>
<p>“The main layer relies mainly on coincidental magic to protect the owner from any cause of death. To outside observation, it will look like a very specific version of Felix Felicis: lethal spells will miss their target, poisonings will be thwarted, accidents and diseases diverted. The owner will seem to escape death with impossible odds, by sheer luck.”</p>
<p>James’ luck had always been like that, making him the most reckless person Lily has ever met. His Quidditch exploits relied heavily on his certainty of survival, though he had collected a number of trips to the Hospital Ward because of it. James had been absolutely confident he could not die, and during the War, he had been generous with his gift. He systematically put himself between his friends and Death. Until Harry was born. Without hesitation, James had given the Cloak to their newborn son, fated even before his birth to face the Dark Lord. Giving up the protection of the Cloak had changed James as much as fatherhood had. Overnight, he was not invincible anymore, he had to fight the habit of a life to rush head first in the heat of danger. Suddenly, he was as mortal as any of them, and in charge of the most important and powerless person in their life. James had felt a coward then, fearing for their family. Lily thinks he was braver than he had ever been.</p>
<p>The Dark Lord chuckles as their eyes meet.</p>
<p>“That certainly reminds me of that insufferable husband of yours. It was frustrating to no end, seeing him escape me again and again.”</p>
<p>But not anymore. James’ luck had finally run out, and she is facing his murderer. She wants so much to let herself drown in grief and rage, and let it all out through her wand in a rain of spells and magic. Except she has no wand now, only those damned manacles that force to move like an old lady. Her rage and her grief are buried under layers and layers in her mind, because, as much as she wants to avenge James, Harry needs her more. She knows James would never forgive her, if she put her vengeance before their son. He was dead so they could live. She does more for his memory by protecting Harry than by facing his killer.</p>
<p>“When my husband transferred the artifact to our son, I took a closer look at the protections woven in it. That’s when I noticed that only part of the wards were active, but the main protection was dormant. The magic is ancient, and very unorthodox. It mixes coincidental magic with necromancy, Dark Arts, soul magic and binding rituals. The last two I knew quite well from our work to retrieve the Fidelius Charm from the old notes of Helena Ravenclaw. But I was too unfamiliar with the Darker parts for me to understand how the wards worked. I only knew what they were supposed to do.”</p>
<p>“How ?”</p>
<p>“<em>The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.</em> I always found the Potter’s family motto strange, because none of them appeared to reject the idea of dying or be afraid of it. But the wards, though incomplete, intended to do exactly that: defeat death. They make it so the soul cannot be severed from the body by any means.”</p>
<p>“Why were there incomplete ? Where are the other parts ?”</p>
<p>“I think there are two missing parts. One of them is supposed to power the spell, it must be some kind of amplifier. The amount of magic necessary is tremendous, more than any magical being could produce on its own. I have no idea what the second part could be.”</p>
<p>“But you have a theory.”</p>
<p>Lily nods slowly.</p>
<p>“When I was researching, I found a way to power the spell. It was not…renewable, but as a back-up, it would do. I set the wards up on Harry. When you tried to kill him, they activated. Except it didn’t work as planned.”</p>
<p>“Why ?”</p>
<p>“Because you did not kill me. The fuel was supposed to be a soul, willingly sacrificed. My soul.The part of spell I had engineered to power the wards was based on the creation of Horcruxes. That’s why I am so familiar with their theoretical formalism, I spent weeks twisting them to do what I wanted them to. But when the wards activated, I was still alive. So the Horcrux creation ritual did exactly what it was supposed to do: it ripped a part of my soul to feed the ward, instead of consuming it entirely. There was not enough energy, and the wards failed. The killing curse backfired, but not entirely. Your body died, but your soul was not severed from it.”</p>
<p>Lily has finished writing the whole set of equations describing the failed partially powered ritual. She is acutely aware of her failure that night. She had purposefully placed herself, vulnerable, wandless, in front of her son, to make sure Voldemort would kill her first. She had not fought, not cast a single spell, she only had begged. The Dark Lord had probably seen right through her. He had felt the trap, and refused to raise the bait and kill her.</p>
<p>Voldemort is already filling the board with a new set of equations, combining both their spellworks.</p>
<p>“I had many theories of what could have happened that night. But I never imagined we would have had two Horcrux creation rituals keyed on the same trigger. Yours should have worked as intended, even if you were alive when it was triggered. Since your soul was not damaged, it should have been aspired totally, as with a Dementor’s Kiss. But the two spell signatures were too close, they interacted with one another. The resonance would have fragmented your soul, and destabilized mine”, he says, finishing his calculations. “The ripped piece of soul would have latched onto the most powerful magical element there. But we haven't found any trace of it in the remnants of your house. That means…”</p>
<p>They both pause, contemplating the results. Eyes fixed on the blackboard, they reach their conclusion together, breaking the silence at the same time.</p>
<p>“Your son is alive.”</p>
<p>“Harry is a Horcrux.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>-----</p>
<p>Lily’s emerald eyes meet Voldemort’s ruby ones. He knows. She has to find a way. She has to convince him, lure him, bargain with him, anything. She cannot fail again.</p>
<p>“You knew”, he accuses, eyes narrowing dangerously. “There is no surprise in your emotional response. You knew your son was alive. That’s why you suddenly changed tactics and cooperated. You wanted to keep me out of your head. Where is he !”</p>
<p>Already he is pressing against her fragile mind, threatening the shreds of sanity she has left. Harry, she has to be strong for Harry. She has to be cunning. She has to find a way.</p>
<p>“I don’t know. I purposefully refused to know. Dumbledore has him, that’s all I needed to know. He’s safe from you there.”</p>
<p>“Not for long, I know how to bypass your ward this time, I can finally kill him.”</p>
<p>“But you don’t need to !” Lily pleads.</p>
<p>“His very existence is a threat to mine. I fail to see a more pressing issue.”</p>
<p>“He’s your Horcrux now ! He houses a part of your soul.”</p>
<p>“Immaterial. I have other Horcruxes. I can afford to lose one to counter fate.”</p>
<p>“You already have countered fate ! By making him a Horcrux, you marked him as your equal, you literally made him your equal. You gave him the power to vanquish you, because as long as he’s alive, no one can defeat you.”</p>
<p>Keep talking, Lily. One step at a time. Convince him that Harry is not a danger.</p>
<p>“Can’t you see ? She continues. “The prophecy says, “<em>either must die at the hand of the other</em>”. But now that he’s your Horcrux, he cannot kill you anymore, the only way to fulfill the prophecy is for you to kill him.”</p>
<p>“I still fail to see why I should not.”</p>
<p>“Because of the Contingency Theory. A prophecy does not describe a specific future. It constrains the possible futures. When a prophecy is made, all futures where it is disproved cease to be possible, only futures where it can be fulfilled are still accessible. That’s why prophecies are always true, but we still have free will. We can still choose the way the prophecy is fulfilled.”</p>
<p>“No one ever proved the Contingency Theory.”</p>
<p>“Grindelwald did. He couldn’t tell me how, he was bound to secrecy after the war. He told me true Seers rarely make great sorcerers, but great sorcerers lack the feeling of what the Sight really is. People researching Divination Theory were always looking for answers by researching Time, when the answer had been there for millennia in Charm Theory. The Contingency Theory is what makes Coincidental Magic possible. Coincidental Magic is but artificial wizard-made prophecies. The caster constrains the range of possible futures so that the purpose of the spell is fulfilled. It hijacks the mechanisms that Time uses to protects itself. I suspect Grindelwald tried to use his knowledge in Old Magic and the Sight to force a future where he would win but was ultimately trapped by the contradictions. But here, you did what he couldn’t: you forced an outcome to the prophecy. As long as Harry and you are both alive, no one else can kill either of you. Harry would be the only one able to kill you, except he cannot anymore, because as long as he’s alive, you cannot die.”</p>
<p>“He could still kill us both simultaneously.”</p>
<p>“No, because then he would die by his own hand, not by yours, and the prophecy would not be fulfilled entirely. If you kill him, the constraint on the future is released, and anyone could try and hunt down your Horcruxes to kill you. As long as you keep him alive, you’re invincible.”</p>
<p>He starts pacing the room. Hope blooms in her chest. Maybe she can do it, maybe she can convince him to spare Harry, maybe she can avoid failing again.</p>
<p>“I need to get him back.” He says. “I can’t leave him in the hands of Dumbledore. He could destroy the boy at any moment.”</p>
<p>“Albus would never harm Harry !” She protests.</p>
<p>“How naive you are…What do you think he’ll do when he realizes what the boy is to me ? How do you think he’ll choose between ending the life of an orphaned half-alive baby, and winning the war ? Oh, he’ll be sorry, for sure, he’ll be devastated. He’ll try to be as humane as possible about it, assuredly. He’ll feel the guilt, he’ll regret having to do it. But he won’t hesitate, not after what temporizing cost him against Grindelwald.”</p>
<p>Oh no, no, no, it couldn’t be, Albus could not, he was so kind, so wise always, he’d find another way…But would he ? She thinks about the Albus Bathilda gossiped about, the young idealist planning revolution at the side of the Dark Wizard he loved. Who justified Grindelwald’s future atrocities for the greater good. Who in the end, had defeated the man he loved and condemned him to decades of isolation in his own prison, to win the war. She thinks about young Ariana, buried in Godric’s Hollow like James, the first casualty of a war she couldn’t understand. Does Lily know her mentor at all ? Albus Dumbledore is not the only one Voldemort has ever feared because he is kind, nor wise, nor knowledgeable. He is fearsome because he is ready to pay the price for victory. Even when the price was Sirius, or Lily. Even if the price is Harry. Suddenly, not one, but two of the most powerful wizards of the century are after her baby. Except…</p>
<p>“But he can’t kill Harry, the prophecy won’t let him, you’re the only one who can.” She concludes.</p>
<p>“He doesn’t need to”, he replies. “He only need to remove the soul from the body.”</p>
<p>A Dementor. Lily’s stomach churns at the idea. He could feed Harry to the Dementors, and that wouldn’t kill him, only destroy Voldemort’s horcrux and leave an empty shell.</p>
<p>“What would you give me, in exchange for the life of you son ? Both outcomes are relatively similar, from my point of view, I don't really care either way. But for a mother, it would make all the difference in the world. What is your bid ?”</p>
<p>“Anything. Everything.”</p>
<p>“Everything… and everyone ?” Voldemort muses. “You already proved that you are ready to sacrifice your very soul for his continued survival. Would you give me your soul ? Would you pledge yourself to me, would you kill the ones you love on my command, for him ?”</p>
<p>“What certainty would I have, that you would keep your word ?”</p>
<p>“None. Worse, as you pointed out earlier, we are absolutely certain he will die by my hand eventually. It cannot be any other way.”</p>
<p>“Then I fail to see what you can give me.”</p>
<p>“Time. I can give you both time. I am willing to consider leaving you alive, which is more than anyone else on Dumbledore’s side will grant you. I am the only one placing his survival over the possibility of destroying part of my soul. It is time to decide whether you will sacrifice your infant son on the altar of your political ideals. Or you can join me and serve me faithfully, and I will protect him from any harm, for as long as he doesn’t threaten my reign.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The silence is deafening. She thinks about James, who has fought and died in this war. About Sirius, thrown to the Dementors by a corrupt Ministry without even a fair trial, for a crime he never committed. About her friends Remus, Alice and Frank who still fight for what they deem right. About her friends Peter and Severus, who do so, too. About the McKinnons and the Prewetts, who have died for it, and her own parents who have paid the price of begetting a witch. About Petunia, who have never forgiven her for taking them in this war, and hates with the same incandescent passion as the Lestranges. About the Order, losing ground day after day, curse after curse, death after death like exhausted sailors bailing the water out of their sinking ship. About Dumbledore, helping her to craft the Peverell wards. About inmate Grindelwald, broken by the brutal collision between his dreams and the unyielding man he loves. About all the ideals she holds dear, of equality, freedom, justice, and duty to protect those who cannot protect themselves. About motherhood and the time she fed Harry for the first time, minutes after his birth, and the ever present need to hide him from his fate.</p>
<p>
  <em>I can’t lose him twice.</em>
</p>
<p>She falls on one knee in front of the Dark Lord.</p>
<p>“I will serve you, my Lord.”</p>
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